Mapping the forest disturbance regimes of Europe
By Cornelius Senf, Rupert Seidl. bioRxiv, 2020
435 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Changes in forest disturbances can have strong impacts on forests, yet we lack consistent data on Europe’s forest disturbance regimes and their changes over time. Here we used satellite data to map three decades of forest disturbances across continental Europe, and analysed the patterns and trends in disturbance size, frequency and severity. Between 1986 and 2016, 17% of Europe’s forest area was disturbed by anthropogenic and/or natural causes. We identified 36 million individual disturbance patches with a mean patch size of 1.09 ha, which equals an annual average of 0.52 disturbance patches per km 2 of forest area. The majority of disturbances were stand replacing. While trends in disturbance size were highly variable, disturbance frequency consistently increased and disturbance severity decreased. Here we present a continental-scale characterization of Europe’s forest disturbance regimes and their changes over time, providing spatial information that is critical for understanding the ongoing changes in Europe’s forests. Changes in forest disturbance affect their sustainability. This study finds that between 1986 and 2016, 36 million disturbances by humans or other causes affected 17% of Europe’s forest area.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/738e2c5626f2c4d5f8729ead8e8ad3bccbea7310
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In Global and Planetary Change
- Jonathan Lenoir
- Jonas J. Lembrechts
- Michael B. Ashcroft
- Miska Luoto
- Juha Aalto
- A. Hampe
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- Florian Zellweger
Citations in the corpus
- Population trends of common breeding birds in Germany 1990–2018 (2020, background): “Future trends in forest birds will also depend on forest disturbance: Crown mortality due to drought and extreme events such as windthrow and bark beetle outbreaks have been increasing over the past 30 years and are expected to further increase due to climate change (Senf et al. 2018, 2020; Senf and”
- Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda (2021, positive): “Moreover, other global changes such as forest disturbance and widespread canopy opening (Senf & Seidl, 2020) might accelerate the effects of climate change in forests through their impact on microclimates.”